Reviews: Chu, Wesley

The Lives of Tao —
Wesley Chu
Tao, book 1

Wesley
Chu’s 2013 debut novel The Lives of Tao appears to be
warmly regarded, if one can judge by its 3.77 stars on Goodreads and
4 stars on Amazon. Once again I find myself out of step with the
majority of readers. Welcome to yet another installment in “Nobody
Cares Why You Hate Shakespeare, Leo,” with me playing the starring
role of Leo Tolstoy.

Betrayed
by a fellow agent, Edward Blair does what he can to salvage the
situation by leaping from the top of an office building to certain
death below. This is rather hard on Blair, but it frees Tao, Blair’s
alien symbiont, to seek a new host who isn’t about to be captured by
the enemy. Tao must find that host quickly, before Earth’s hostile
atmosphere kills him. Alas for Tao, the only possible human host
close enough is an out of shape, self-loathing programmer named Roan Tan.

It
was mere luck that Tan was close to where Blair went splut. Bad luck,
because thanks to it Tan finds himself drafted into a covert civil
war raging across the Earth.